Build the Jellyfish Game

Supersedes: 20260421-infinite-aquarium-concept.md, 20260421-virtual-creator-market-implementation-plan.md

  • Status: accepted
  • Deciders: V-Sekai, fire
  • Tags: V-Sekai, Jellyfish, Aquarium, Game, CRIS, 20260425-jellyfish-game

The Context

multiplayer-fabric has no reference application. The four existing jellyfish ADRs describe infrastructure pieces and a creator market concept but do not record a single go/no-go decision with explicit prioritisation. Without one, effort scatters across competing items and the demo never ships.

The Problem Statement

No ADR commits to building the jellyfish game as the current top priority. The CRIS score below makes that commitment explicit.

Design

The jellyfish game is the Infinite Aquarium: a social, bioluminescent ocean where players design jellyfish, release them into a shared zone, and watch them behave under RECTGTN planning.

Pass condition: a player-uploaded jellyfish appears in VR, visible to a second player simultaneously, moving under its species domain plan rather than a hard-coded phase table. See 20260425-jellyfish-pass-condition.md for the consolidated design.

Implementation details are recorded in the following ADRs; they remain accepted and are not superseded:

Work sequencing follows the phases in 20260421-virtual-creator-market-implementation-plan.md (superseded by this ADR; phases remain valid as a task checklist).

The Benefits

A passing demo proves the infrastructure composes correctly end-to-end. Creators and operators can evaluate the platform against something concrete rather than documentation.

The Downsides

A bioluminescent jellyfish ocean is a narrow theme. Operators building avatar showrooms or board games must extrapolate. A more neutral demo exercises fewer platform primitives and is less compelling to the creator audience the product targets.

The Road Not Taken

A tag game (one chaser, rest flee across zone boundaries) would stress zone handoff without touching asset delivery or ReBAC. It validates the engine but not the product. The aquarium validates both, at the same engine complexity cost.

The Infrequent Use Case

A zone with no uploaded jellyfish (new operator, empty ocean) still passes the demo if the player’s own jellyfish appears after upload. The shared-ocean property is a second milestone, not a prerequisite for the pass condition.

Client strategy

The Godot wasm32/wasm64 web export is dropped. Active client surface is Godot-native:

Godot native PCVR client handles VR presence, jellyfish creation, and entity control. It uses the xr-grid project with OpenXR and the picoquic WebTransport backend. See 20260425-godot-player.md.

Godot --headless observer (operator and CI smoke-test paths) is deferred until the VR client ships. The design (reusing FabricMultiplayerPeer and fabric_client.gd, no separate parser, no TypeScript) remains valid; see 20260425-godot-observer.md.

A browser client is SOMEDAY; the Three.js WebGPU design (20260425-threejs-webgpu-zone-client.md) is superseded and not being built.

In Core and Done by Us

  • multiplayer-fabric-godot/modules/multiplayer_fabric_mmog/ — zone server, swarm sim, RECTGTN integration
  • jellyfish_asset_loader.gd — asset manifest → CDN fetch → scene instance
  • assets/domains/jellyfish_common.jsonld, jellyfish_bioluminescent.jsonld — RECTGTN species domains
  • multiplayer-fabric-zone-backend — GET /shards/:id/assets, ReBAC, Uro
  • xr-grid project — Godot native PCVR client, jellyfish creation
  • headless_log_observer.gd — Godot --headless observer (deferred; ships after VR)

Status

Status: Accepted

Decision Makers

  • iFire

Further Reading

  1. 20260421-rectgtn-jellyfish-behavior.md — RECTGTN planning implementation
  2. 20260421-infinite-aquarium-concept.md — aquarium concept (superseded)
  3. 20260421-virtual-creator-market-implementation-plan.md — phase checklist (superseded)
  4. 20260423-sandbox-rebac-behavior.md — sandbox for creator executable code